Targeting the "right" niche means targeting a niche that gives you a decent chance of landing on page 1, even if only on occasion.
Remember that if no one sees your listing, then no matter how good the design is, it wont sell.
And I believe the "myth" around the importance of keyword optimization is largely blown out of proportion.
A "perfectly optimized" (whatever that means) new product listing, with no sales history, in a very competitive niche will likely never see page 1 and will only get seen if a customer ventures beyond that first page of search results and finds it, which is quite rare.
Ideally we want to be targeting high demand / low competition niches when we design for Amazon Merch products.
Here's how I go about doing that.
Tip #1: Search Amazon Merch Products
Only searching Merch products means filtering out the fulfilled-by-merchant listings that people sell through Seller Central.
Filtering them out makes sense as most customers are looking for the "Prime" check mark next to the products for them to consider purchasing.
Here's how to do that:
I built this "Search Merch" tool which attempts to do exactly what it sounds like: Search Amazon Merch products ONLY.
Click here (or below) to use the Search Merch tool »
All you have to do is seed it with your keywords, then click the product type that you'd like to search against.
In the example below, I searched for "Fantasy Football Loser":
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They all look relatively similar becuase they're all Amazon Merch listings, created using the same template.
Tip #2: Look For 500 Results Or Fewer
After performing your keyword search using the Search Merch tool, check the top left corner - Amazon should tell you roughly how many results matched your query.
I say roughly, because if you type in extremely broad keywords like "cat lover", you may see something like "Over 4,000 results" instead of giving you the actual figures.
In my example "Fantasy Football Loser", there were 243 results returned.
* click to expand
Look for 500 results or fewer when conducting niche research using the Search Merch tool.
This means the "Fantasy Football Loser" would qualify thus far as a design worth pursuing, but there's one more step we need to complete.
Tip #3: Validate Sales Volume
So far we've covered how to validate that niche keywords are low competition, but what about the second half - high demand?
It's equally important that our designs are being sought after by customers, if we have any expectation of making sales.
We'll use one of, if not my favorite Chrome extensions for selling on Amazon: DS Amazon Quick View.
Click here to download DS Amazon Quick View for free »
This Chrome extension injects the best seller rank (BSR) for each product listing in the search results right below each product, allowing us to quickly evaluate the niche as a whole by scanning the search results page (SERP).
I LOVE this extension for Merch, FBA, and selling on Amazon in general.
Continuing with our Fantasy Football Loser example, here are the results:
* click to expand
My general rule of thumb is:
If the first row of results on page 1 has an average BSR of under 1M, it's worth pursuing.
This means "Fantasy Football Loser" would qualify as a worthwhile trend to create some Amazon Merch designs for!
Using these methods should quickly & immediately improve your niche research process and help increase your Amazon Merch sales.
In Summary
To quickly recap what we covered in this post, you can improve your niche targeting using 3 easy steps:
- Search only Amazon Merch products: My Search Merch tool lets you search Amazon listings while filtering out non-Merch products
- Validate competition: Target niches with 500 competing results or fewer
- Validate demand: Use DS Amazon Quick View to get an idea from search results of how well a niche is currently selling
